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When did we start talking about teen birth? It might be later than you think. In 1956, the height of the post-war baby boom, the median age of first marriage for females in the US dropped to a historic low of 20.1 years old. The following year, the US recorded its highest ever teen birth rate of 96.3 per 1,000 girls aged 15-19. In other words, nearly 10% of American teenage girls had a baby in 1957. However, 86% of those births occurred to married teens -- whether the marriage was shotgun or not.
The 1960s ushered in countless changes, including the commercial availability of the birth control pill, the nascent feminist movement, and changing attitudes towards premarital sex. Both teen birth rates and total fertility rates for older women dropped steadily in the 1960s and 1970s, but an increasing number of births were to unmarried mothers. The 1976 Guttmacher report, “11 Million Teenagers," was one of the first policy reports to specifically address teen childbearing as a social issue. Though teen birth rates increased slightly in the 1980s, they've been on a nearly non-stop decline since then. Teen pregnancy and teen abortion rates have similarly declined.
In 2018, the US teen birth rate reached a historic low of 17.4 per 1,000, due in part to increasing access to effective contraception. Nearly 9 out of 10 of those births were to unmarried teens.
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